Leaf cutter bees are becoming increasingly valuable in crop pollination. In contrast to honey bees, which fly long distances (several miles) and pollinate over wide areas, leaf cutter bees fly short distances (several hundred yards) and pollinate within a small area.
The continued advance of the Africanized "killer" bee, reaching Texas in 1993, and other unrelated honey bee disease problems, has raised potential long term concerns with honey bee pollination. Leaf cutter bees have become attractive potentially competitive alternative pollinators.
Accordingly leaf cutter bee pollination has generated and continues to generate substantial interest. Leaf cutter bees are solitary bees, unlike honey bees where only one female bee, the queen, lays fertile eggs, every female leaf cutter bee lays fertile eggs. The life cycle is quite different, the leaf cutter bees, female and male, overwinter as cocoons (pupae), emerging in the spring. The males who outnumber the females about two to one, mate with the females after emergence. The females then cut leaves and prepare cells in which they lay their eggs, which hatch into grubs, then become overwintering pupae or cocoons. The female typically prepares from ten to twenty-five egg cells, each with their cut leaf, which develop into cocoons (pupae), and later bees, of which about a third are female.
Commercially there are many systems of nesting leaf cutter bees, which have three separate components, the nest shelter, the mode of handling or installing the nests, and the nest structure itself. This invention is primarily concerned with nest structure.